A Stepping Stone to VITA 100 Power and Double-Density Modules

As AI and advanced processing systems expand in into edge-computing platforms, they will continue to demand extremely high bandwidth, often in a constrained amount of space. This is particularly true for defense-based computing systems for C5ISR, and they will often leverage Modular Open System Architecture Systems (MOSA).

Traditionally, OpenVPX has been the de facto standard for MIL ruggedized MOSA requirements. But, even that high-performance architecture, which allows for backplane performance at 100 GbE (over 25 Gbaud/s per lane) and PCIe Gen4 speeds, won’t be fast enough for some of the next generation of designs.

VITA 100 (via VITA) promises up to 8X the performance of OpenVPX, but it’s still in draft and will take some time to go through the prototyping and integration churn. However, there’s a stepping stone to the technology with VITA 91.

VITA 100 Overview

VITA 100 has a great deal of buzz about it, and many players in the defense marketplace want to be on the leading edge of technology. New specifications take time, though, not only to create, but to be proven out. The faster and more powerful the technology, the most challenging it is to complete both elements of development of a new specification.

VITA 100 will reach the 8X OpenVPX performance in three ways:

• Double the density of the connector.
• Double the data rate of the connector.
• Cut the bit/baud factor in half.

Figure 1 presents a chart on VITA 100 performance with PCIe Gen 5/6 and 400-GbE architectures for future AI accelerators. This bandwidth aggregates high-resolution data from radar, sonar, and electro-optical sensors without resulting in bottlenecks. VITA 91 is compatible with today’s OpenVPX architecture and utilizes a similar double-density connector that will be used in VITA 100.